TW: what to do about it?

[pentamer]

I see a few things marked with TW, which I assume means trigger warning. The problem, though, is that they then go on to immediately mention stuff and trigger it. Because it's usually prominent, for obvious reasons, even if I'm just scanning, I end up seeing it

Comments

[cjwatson]

I usually see it on links (on Twitter) or on the outside of cut tags (here or on DW), where it's easy to avoid following/opening. If it's just at the start of a long article then it probably only works for people who don't scan a screenful at a glance.

[pseudomonas]

I've also seen people, on FB, interpose a few newlines between the warning and the content, thus pushing the content below the "click for more" threshold.

[emperor]

I think the theory is that if any of the TW are disturbing, you skip over the article/tweet/whatever that they're prepended to.

[atreic]

I think the point is that people are less triggered by encountering the name of their trigger out of context than they would be if they were halfway through reading an article and it turned into a graphic description of or detailed discussion of the trigger. It's not (just) so people can avoid things, it's so people can brace themselves before reading things and chose when and how to do it.

[lnr]

The other commenters seem to have missed that sometimes the mere mention of the type of trigger is triggering, never mind the details. Certainly I can find my heartrate increasing at some particular trigger warnings even if I don't go on to read the content (though I do find that they're useful when I do have the right frame of mind in order to brace myself before continuing).

[pentamer]

I think that's it. I'm not sure that it often takes a graphic or explicit description of something to induce things like flashbacks, it's maybe even more likely by just a short, prominent and generic phrase out of context